


Waiting for Intervention

by The_Client



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Abuse, Angst, Character Study, F/M, Hopeful Ending, Kylo Ren Backstory, Mental Health Issues, POV Second Person, canon compliant through the last jedi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-26
Updated: 2020-04-26
Packaged: 2021-03-02 08:33:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23848243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Client/pseuds/The_Client
Summary: Ben Solo's headspace from childhood throughThe Last Jedi.***“Then your fingertips touch across the worlds, and you know she must comprehend, all at once, what it is to be you – for in that moment you experience the totality of being her. And she weeps. Does not condemn, does not even pity, that sentiment poisonously rooted in the smug awareness of one's own superior position. You know the name for what she's feeling, even as you furiously try to suppress it from your consciousness, to strangle the hope (always false, always cruel). Compassion.She weeps. And then she delivers herself to you. As if shechoosesyou.But afterward, when the Voice has been silenced forever and in the idiotic flush of that victory you dare to hope – she demands that you go back. But every night you’d promised yourselfyou would never go back,would never again turn yourself inside out, contort and shatter yourself in futile efforts to please them. Never again. If you can never be content, at least you'll remain, at last, free.And on the field of salt you prove that resolve, somehow find the unspeakable courage to step out and defy the terror of your past. And you survive.”
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 6
Kudos: 13





	Waiting for Intervention

**Author's Note:**

> Content warning: mental health issues, abuse, brief suicidal thoughts

You're born knowing you're defective, flawed, fundamentally loathsome in some way you cannot understand or control. You’ve felt it in the minds that surround you for longer than you can remember: the obscure unease that accompanies every thought of you, every moment in your presence. When language comes, the feeling coalesces around a single word:  _darkness_ . There is a darkness in you. Those closest to you know it, believe it; in the vulnerability of your half-formed mind you cannot help but believe it too.

You're also born with the temperament that yearns endlessly for affection, reassurance, approval. When you feel such things in others, the reverberation of joy within you is almost unbearable. It’s addictive. You can’t help but seek it again and again. You spend every waking moment devising new ways to please them.

But  _the darkness_ hangs over you always, poisoning even these moments of bliss. When you do things others cannot, those closest to you are impressed, but also alarmed. Others don’t seem aware of  _the darkness_ in so many words, but they know something is wrong: their minds ooze pity, or judgment, or mockery. None allow you close, save those you were born among. But they know about  _the darkness,_ and they are often distracted, or away. 

Eventually, there are times when the loneliness or the frustration or the humiliation becomes too shattering to be borne, when  _things happen_ that you cannot control, but that you know are awful, terrifying, wrong. You come to grasp the substance of their conversations about you, with each other behind closed doors, with themselves in what they mistake for the privacy of their own thoughts. You come to understand the hopelessness of your need to be accepted without pity, without fear.

***

You would have died, once you grew old enough to grasp the possibility and the means of bringing it about. But that-which-is provides an intervention. The Voice introduces you to the idea that  _they are wrong to cause you pain._ The thought has never occurred to you; the fundamental wrongness of you, the certainty that you deserve every drop of anguish ever visited upon you, has always been as obvious and undeniable as the pull of planetary gravity. 

When the Voice proceeds to new revelations – that  _the darkness_ they perceive as your irredeemable flaw in fact makes you superior, that not only can you live without them but you can,  _should_ , wreak your vengeance upon them – you don’t really believe it. But the rage and grief that have awakened in you – over the possibility of, not the happy, but the  _tolerable,_ the  _not-actively-anguished_ existence, that was taken from you before you even knew to want it – is real. And if the Voice repeats its more elaborate assertions often enough, if you repeat them to yourself, you can pretend to believe from moment to moment, day to day, year to year. Enough to continue, to endure.

As you grow older and capable of more sophisticated thought, you conceptualize your desire to please others, to experience love and acceptance, as  _the pull to the Light._ The Voice advises you to resist it, since it leads only to heartbreak when your attempts to win affection backfire, or are poisoned by undercurrents of pity and revulsion. If you were only strong enough, you could leave this cycle of pain behind.

When they send you away, it’s crushing, but not surprising; the Voice has warned you. You simply lacked the fortitude to believe it, until it happened. When the Voice further warns,  _they sent you here to die,_ it seems too far-fetched, too extreme. Until the night you wake bathed in green light.

The Light having burned you again and again, what is left but to take shelter in  _the darkness_ ? To make of it an armor to protect against further injury, a grim visage to frighten away further torment, a disguise to cover every inch of what you still can’t help but believe is your own monstrous ugliness?

The Voice is different, once there’s no going back. Still teasing with hints of your innate superiority, your potential – but scathing in its assessment of how little you’ve managed to fulfill it. You must be forged in suffering, it says, body and soul, until all trace of weakness is gone. 

There are moments when you see the entirety, the carefully manipulated balance of praise and condemnation, hope and despair that enmeshes you. But you do your best to suppress the knowledge, for the Voice informs you that there’s no way out, that any thought of flight – even into death – will be detected and punished beyond your imagining. And even without that threat, you can't,  _won't,_ go back, won't return to what has become a blur of anguished abandonment and green-lit terror.

So you do your best to believe the Voice, moment to moment, day to day, year to year. Enough to endure.

***

Years pass. You can't remember the last time you slept restfully.

You'd be content to let the past die in its own time. But the past won’t leave you be; it travels out of its way to torment you. When that-which-is sends another intervention – a creature of power equal to your own, yet seemingly helpless before you – your resolve wavers pitifully; like a fool you find yourself daring to imagine her as a student, a colleague … you dare not name what else. But she has emerged from the vastness of space on the vessel of your childhood – now the ghost ship of your nightmares – bearing the map to the locus of your terror.

When the Voice issues  _that_ command, you tell yourself it's for the best, that you do something so unspeakably awful that none of the others you left behind will ever torment you with false promises of acceptance and forgiveness, ever again. But when he puts his hand on your face – the first skin-to-skin contact you've felt in years – the old longing reasserts itself, lets you dare to wonder if the promise might not have been false, if there might have been hope. Too late, too late.

Enraged by your own pathetic weakness, you remind yourself,  _insist_ to yourself, that the love in his eyes was but a lie on his part, or a delusion on yours – bait for yet another cruel trap of false hope ending in heartbreak. You throw yourself into the combat that follows; you beat your own wounds, striving to arouse enough outrage to override the regret and despair. But something has broken; bracing yourself with  _the darkness_ is no longer enough to stabilize the fracture, to make the injury bearable.

You find yourself revealing things that have gone unspoken for years, even to the Voice, even in your own mind. Then your fingertips touch across the worlds, and you know she must comprehend, all at once, what it is to be you – for in that moment you experience the totality of being her. And she  _weeps._ Does not condemn, does not even  _pity_ , that sentiment poisonously rooted in the smug awareness of one's own superior position. You know the name for what she's feeling, even as you furiously try to suppress it from your consciousness, to strangle the hope (always false, always cruel).  _Compassion._

She weeps. And then she delivers herself to you. As if she  _chooses_ you.

But afterward, when the Voice has been silenced forever and in the idiotic flush of that victory you dare to hope – she demands that you  _go back._ She's found her belonging among those you left behind; she will not be parted from them. But every night when the memories of old anguish tormented you, you’d promised yourself  _you would never go back_ , would never again turn yourself inside out, contort and shatter yourself in futile efforts to please them.  _Never again._ If you can never be content, at least you'll remain, at last, free.

And on the field of salt you prove that resolve, somehow find the unspeakable courage to step out and defy the terror of your past. And you  _survive._

***

It's a hollow victory, of course; what was everything to you was to them but a cruel joke at your expense. And now the loneliness stretches before you without end, without even the Voice. 

But the habit of enduring, of surviving _,_ has rooted deep within you.

So you survive, and wait, not letting yourself consciously understand that you're waiting. For the next intervention. 


End file.
